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Queensborough Community College is a community college among a group of institutions within the City University of New York that has dedicated its resources to renewing and revitalizing its core and general education programs. In fact, program and curricular reflection has been a growing trend since the 1980s, when institutions like Harvard and Stanford, which embarked on such a renewal of their own core curricula, highlighted how curricula were and were not addressing not only the needs of a changed student population, but also the new kinds of general knowledge and the core analytical skills students increasingly need in a world of global information and knowledge exchange.
With the support of other CUNY campuses and leadership of the City University of New York, Queensborough has sought to effect a gradual shift in campus culture in ways that allow for collaborative and collegial critical inquiry into how and what we are doing as an undergraduate institution. Working locally on our own campus and in conjunction with other CUNY campuses in teams of faculty members and administrators, we are embarking on deliberate efforts to strengthen general education programs, including writing across the curriculum and across the disciplines, developmental education programs, learning communities, and transfer and articulation initiatives. We started out with asking basic overarching questions such as: What should graduating students know? What skills and values should they possess? These very questions sparked dialogue among faculty and staff and administrators, even among those who rarely if ever talked with their colleagues in other departments or divisions about such matters.
With the creation of a General Education Faculty Inquiry Group and its subsequent efforts to expand the conversation, questions about General Education penetrated Queensborough’s campus. Conversations were provocative, inclusive, and lively. They took significant time and energy, and they had cumulative effects that ultimately graduated to college-wide collaborative discussions, fora, and conference presentations. Queensborough faculty members – whether they teach in professional programs or in the liberal arts -- strive for consensus on a range of curricular and pedagogical issues, from the general philosophy of liberal education to the exercise of extracting philosophies that evolve from teaching and learning and lend to new dimensions of constructivist pedagogy.
Out of this inquiry, groups of faculty members have created focused committees that explore “Teachers Who Care,” “Cornerstone/Capstone Experiences,” and “E-portfolios.” Perhaps the most promising proposals for reform of late exist between members of the Cornerstone/Capstone Progression for the General Education Curriculum. The synergy created among members of this committee led to the development of a proposed “helix model” that challenges the college to think about how a cornerstone to capstone curriculum might combine with recursive/progressive pedagogy to enable students to both succeed and graduate from the college. A member of the committee also participated in the Bridge to Transfer Program with Queens College (CUNY), brought those discussions into the Cornerstone/Capstone conversation, and as a result, Bridge to Transfer functions as a laboratory for the creation of a progressive structure for the General Education curriculum. It is these ongoing activities that take place every day on campus, among groups of faculty and administrators, which continue to fuel our General Education reform efforts.
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